'Days' to remember

Williamston show examines eccentric post-9/11 nuclear family

How do we respond, how do we recover from
a national trauma? “End Days,” now playing at the Williamston Theater,
shows the unfolding impact of the 9/11 experience on a nuclear family.
Although there may very well be 10,000 aftermath stories of that fateful
September day, this story is more than just another one.

Writer Deborah Zoe Laufer’s script gives
us a glimpse of the reasons that sometimes lurk behind a person going
off the deep end of catastrophic religious thinking, and how our
seemingly nutty extremism twists the lives of our closest loved ones.
Emily Sutton-Smith as Sylvia is accompanied on stage by an iconic Jesus,
who is invisible to her family but fully
dominant in her thoughts. She is take-me-Jesus ready for the immediacy
of the apocalypse, but wrenchingly concerned as well for the salvation
of the souls of her clinically depressed, emotionally shut-down husband,
Arthur, and her angry, rebellious teenage daughter, Rachel.

Sutton-Smith is all sweaty-earnest in
this role, determinedly one-dimensional, exuding the character of a
drab, humorless and androgynous android, one who has given up hope on
this world and yearns desperately for a safe forever after. Arthur,
played by John Manfredi, is no help whatsoever; he’s a CEO who survived
the attack on the Twin Towers while his entire staff of 60 was
annihilated.

Sutton-Smith is stuck for almost all the
play in the never-changing role of the religiously delusional Sylvia.
Arthur, however, slowly comes back to life emotionally as a richly
textured, deeply caring individual.

He is aided in this transformational
journey by his teenage neighbor, Nelson, played by Eric Eilerson in a
dazzling Elvis outfit. Nelson has an existential trauma of his own to
work through. Eilerson
brings a na´ve, wide-eyed innocence to the stage that is considerably
endearing. He plays well against the numbed-out Arthur and—most
engagingly — against the slightly older and cynically burned out Rachel
(Lydia Hiller), a wonderfully tricked-out gawk that is part Goth, part
drama queen and explosively pissed off by her mother’s religiosity.

Hiller sports a wide range of wigs and get-ups ranging from skeletal to scary, embodying a lost soul screaming for attention.

Just when one thinks this constellation
of characters cannot get any crazier, Stephen Hawking appears —
motorized wheelchair and all — to offer a slightly more reasoned
explanation as to the likelihood of the world coming to an end than that
of St. John of the Apocalypse.

Is there comfort and reassurance in the
notion that the world might not end for at least 100 years as opposed to
the day after tomorrow? Laufer poses that question engagingly in this
play, reminding us all that nothing beyond the present moment is
entirely real.